The Link (33 page)

In the morning, Peter and Robert drive to the local community to check out its newspaper files.

They discover nothing of importance. Holder lived at Harrowgate for fourteen months, LOCAL RESIDENT SUCCUMBS the final headline of his life; no information as to how.

“Rural English periodicals,” Peter comments. “Discreet to the last.” The sort of publication whose headline for a man’s mass murder of his mother, father, brothers, sisters, wife and children would likely be LOCAL RESIDENT SUFFERS FAMILY LOSS.

He will have to put in a call to London to the research service used by ESPS. Maybe they can unearth more evidence about Holder.

“Did you say
unearth
?” asks Robert. Peter chuckles.

Driving back to Harrowgate, they discuss the words Robert wrote. They are obviously from some old poem or play, possibly Shakespeare. An added mystery: Why would Holder—if, indeed, it was Holder—write those words? And is it coincidence that the words and ghost are both from the Middle Ages?

“Peter,” Robert asks him. “Now that it’s just you and me together, tell me: Do you think it’s truly a
ghost
in the traditional sense? A surviving personality?”

“Oh, I don’t know, old man,” Peter says. “I wouldn’t dare make such a declaration at this point. I can only say—unlike our lovely but oh, so hard-headed associate—that I do not entirely rule out the possibility.”

When they reach Harrowgate, they see Cathy talking to a very subdued Mrs. Keighley and decide to leave them undisturbed. They take a stroll in the Armory, an enormous room replete with suits of armor and every variety of armament from England’s past.

They are drifting around, Peter asking Robert some trivia questions about suits or armor—none of which Robert can answer—when they come upon a table on which a sheathed, ivory-handled dagger is lying. Idly, Robert picks it up and unsheathes it, making a slight face as he does.

Footsteps behind them. “Gentlemen,” says Dr. Keighley.

They turn and Robert twitches, the dagger falling from his grip as he sees Keighley dressed in a Nazi uniform.

Gasping, he steps back. He looks down at the fallen dagger, then up again. Keighley is dressed as usual—flannel trousers, tweed jacket, tie and shirt and riding boots.

“I presume you will all be out of here by seven,” he says. “We invite you to join us for a final meal before your departure—if you so desire.”

After he’s gone, Robert takes Peter aside and tells him what he saw. Peter listens, intrigued. “I realize now he looked a good deal younger too,” Robert says. “His hair was blonde.”

They examine the dagger which Dr. Keighley has returned to its table. Robert is loath to touch it again.

“It might be German,” Peter says. “It has no military ornamentation but…”

They discuss what happened. Was Keighley, in fact, a Nazi officer at one time? Is that why Teddie took such an instant dislike to him? Keighley has no German accent, not a trace. How could he have been a Nazi?

“I’m thinking of the phrase you wrote,” Peter says. “
Drowned in sin, they know me not. They forget clean and shedding of my blood
. Why does that make me think of Nazis?”

They look at each other. Then Peter smiles and squeezes Robert’s arm. “We may never have needed Mrs. Warrenton at all,” he says. “You’re providing so much. You
must
pursue this psychic bent, Robert.”

“Perfect word,” says Robert, smiling wanly. “That’s the way I feel. Bent.” He winces. “Right out of shape.”

Supper. Dr. Keighley is quiet but seems content they are leaving.

Mrs. Keighley is, as she was the first night, keyed up, smiling at the wrong moments, saying peculiar things. “Well, we’ll simply have to sell the house eventually. Who’d buy it though? (Laugh) Maybe someone with a fondness for small, ugly ghosts. (Louder laugh) You know anyone like that, Dr. Clarke?”

Eunice says nothing but an undercurrent of tension in her is clear. She glances at her father often, quickly, covertly.

A telephone call from London takes Peter from the room.

When he returns, all hell breaks loose with the Keighleys.

At first, they sit in silence as Peter tells them what he’s learned.

Benjamin Holder was a Jewish actor who’d spent a year at Buchenwald, released by British troops on the very afternoon he was to be gassed. He moved to England, regained an inheritance and purchased Harrowgate. How he died is still unknown.

The reaction of the family is startling. Mrs. Keighley starts to laugh, to cry, to laugh as she cries, repeating, “Yes, of course, of course, it would be that, it would be that.” Eunice starts crying too. Dr. Keighley tries to silence them, ends up shouting, demanding that they “shut their stupid mouths” and leaves the dining room.

After the three have left precipitously, Cathy stares at Robert, at Peter, flabbergasted. “What was that?” she asks.

“We aren’t sure,” says Peter. “But the pieces seem to be coming together.”

“Did anyone notice?” Robert asks. “When Keighley was shouting, there was a distinct trace of German accent in his voice.”

They go up to Dr. Keighley’s room to talk it over. In the distance, they hear Keighley shouting again, the shrill, protesting voice of Mrs. Keighley, the crying misery of Eunice.

“What’s going on?” asks Cathy. “Does anyone have any idea?”

They bring her up to date on Robert’s vision of Keighley as a Nazi officer. Teddie’s antipathy toward the doctor and now this information about Holder seem to fit together.

“But the ghost—
so-called
—is of a man from the Middle Ages,” Cathy reminds them.

“We know that”, Peter says. “We can’t explain it. Notwithstanding, the family was traumatized by what I told them at the table. Mrs. Keighley’s behavior—”

“Maybe I can explain part of that,” Cathy says.

She tells them that, in talking to Mrs. Keighley, she saw the older woman scratching constantly at her left forearm.

“I think she’s on some kind of drug,” she tells them. “My mother’s had several patients with the same problem and their behavior was like Mrs. Keighley’s too—up, down, up, down.”

“Certainly explains a part of it,” Peter says. “Though not the basic situation.”

Cathy suggests a possibility in that area too. Without actually putting it into words, Mrs. Keighley had indicated that her relationship with Dr. Keighley was a strained one; moreover, that Eunice had something to do with it.

“She
is
afraid of her father,” Peter says. “No doubt there.”

“It could be sexual,” Cathy says. “I’ve seen that situation, too, in some of my mother’s cases.”

“The father and daughter?” Peter says, grimacing.

“Possibly,” she answers.

Peter nods. “Well, that fits together too,” he says. “Except, of course, for the prime contradiction—the ghost itself.”

“We haven’t seen it,” Cathy says. “It could be hallucination.”

“By both of them?” says Peter.

“More likely than a real—”

Cathy breaks off, gasping, as a water pitcher standing on a nearby bureau shoots across the room and shatters against a paneled wall.

Startled, the three stand rigid as though waiting for something more to happen.

When nothing does, they look at each other. Cathy’s gaze holds on Robert.

“Oh, now, wait a second, don’t start that,” he tells her. “I didn’t do it.”

“Did I say you did?” she asks, surprised.

“I see that damn ‘prime example’ look in your eyes again,” Robert says.

“No.” Smiling, she squeezes his hand. “No, Rob.”

They walk to the wall and look at it.

One piece of broken pottery, like a jagged knife blade, has remained in the wall.

As Peter and Cathy discuss what happened, Robert keeps staring at the pottery dagger imbedded in the wood.

Abruptly, he moves to the paneling and presses both palms against the wood, leaning the weight of his body against it.

“What are you doing?” Cathy asks.

“Help me,” is all he says.

Peter helps first, then, frowning, Cathy. “What are we supposed to be—?” she starts.

She breaks off as, with a loud clicking noise, a small door opens in the paneling.

“Ah,” says Peter, smiling broadly. “A secret passage; I love it.”

“Control yourself, darling.” There is as much irritation as confusion in Cathy’s tone.

Behind the doorway is a steep set of steps.

“We approach the lair,” murmurs Peter.

“Will you
stop
?” Cathy says; she actually sounds nervous now.

Robert gets a candle from its wall sconce and lights it, leads the way up, Peter second, Cathy last.

It is a strange sight they come upon in the attic.

A small stage has been constructed there, some time in the past from the dusty look of it. In the flickering candlelight, they see costumes hanging, props, some scraps of furniture.

“He was an actor,” Peter says.

“Here,” says Robert.

He holds up the candle so they can see the faded poster on the wall. From a play that Holder starred in.

“Everyman
,” says Peter. “That’s what those lines are from!”

“Which also explains the Elizabethan costume on the ghost,” says Robert.

“What are you doing here? I told you to leave!”

The enraged voice of Dr. Keighley makes them whirl.

He is standing at the head of the steps, his wife behind him.

He starts toward them in a fury, then jerks to a stunned halt, staring at the stage.

All of them recoil at the sight.

The small, ugly man, Benjamin Holder, sitting on a stool, unraveling the stained handkerchief from his neck.

To reveal his throat cut deeply from ear to ear.

Mrs. Keighley screams and falls to her knees.

The vision disappears.

“My God,” says Cathy, trembling. “Oh, my God.”

Keighley turns on his wife, his face twisted by savage rage.

“You had to bring them here, didn’t you?!” he shouts, his German accent clear now. “You had to have them in the house!”

He grabs her by the shoulders, shakes her violently.

“I can live with the dead!” he shrieks. “Why can’t you?!”

The car moves along the hedge-sided road, Peter driving.

The mystery of Harrowgate seems to be revealed now. Dr. Keighley (née Keigelmuller) was a Nazi doctor. Fleeing to England after the war, he had paid a dialectician to help him lose his accent, became a London doctor, then married an English woman. He had lied to his wife when they married, telling her only that he’d been a doctor in the German Army and had nothing whatever to do with the Nazis but had fled to England, afraid that he might be tried as a war criminal regardless. She had believed the lie.

And everything had functioned according to the plan until they’d bought and moved to Harrowgate.

“Obviously the man generated that ghost to serve as the punishment he’d avoided,” Peter says.

“Agreed,” says Cathy. “Except, for the word ‘ghost’. Substitute the words ‘guilt hallucination’ and I buy it all.”

“And his wife?” asks Peter

“The same,” she says. “Guilt. Secondary hallucination.”

“Does that include us?” asks Robert.

“Secondary hallucination, yes.”